Study 2: Brief Discussion
When we asked people in another culture, one not typically investigated by SDT researchers, to tell us in their own words what the experience of autonomy felt like to them, in what for them was a real-world, ecologically valid context (as the university would be to doctoral students), we found our understanding of a key construct like `autonomy' becoming a bit richer. Dimensions of the experience not typically included in official definitions of the construct (e.g., time factor, psychophysiological manifestations, intellectual-emotional manifestations, attribution of success or failure to internal or external factors, and so on) emerged as important markers distinguishing experiences of autonomy from experiences of non-autonomy.
General Discussion
In this paper, we presented a brief overview of two relatively simple, qualitatively informed studies in order to explore ways in which a qualitative approach might begin to push the existing boundaries of a well-established theory, such as Selfdetermination theory (SDT), whose empirical support thus far has rested primarily (and almost exclusively) on quantitative foundations.
Study 1 asked whether people in a different culture might have different or perhaps additional basic psychological needs than the three needs proposed by SDT for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. We found that when teachers, considered to be local experts (that is, experts both with respect to their own culture, and with respect to their professional expertise in human development), were asked what they believed to be vitally important for healthy psychological development, they told us first and foremost that relationships are essential. This finding held, both when teacher responses were considered in terms of frequency counts, and when independent raters classified the teachers' responses. It seems possible to interpret this result as confirmation of one of the basic psychological needs proposed by SDT: the need for relatedness, or mutually meaningful and supportive relationships (for quantitative support, see, e.g., Lynch & Salikhova, 2016). Of course, technically speaking a further test should be made of any candidate need suggested by a group of local experts: especially had the local experts suggested as a need something not within SDT's canonical list of three (competence, relatedness, autonomy), the next logical step would be to test empirically, perhaps through traditional quantitative means, whether that candidate need does in fact promote the outcomes of growth, integration, well-being, and internal motivation when it is satisfied (or, conversely, the degradation of those outcomes, when the candidate need is deprived or thwarted).
The focus of Study 2 was on the need for autonomy. Specifically, we asked doctoral students to describe activities which SDT would consider to reflect autonomy and those which would reflect non-autonomy (the word `autonomy' was not used in the prompts to which participants responded) when in a context, the university, which should presumably have high ecological validity for them. We were interested in whether, in the responses they provided, patterns would emerge to suggest what the experience of autonomy is like for people in a culture that to date has been little studied by SDT researchers (specifically, Tatar), and whether that might shed any light on our understanding of the construct, itself. It did. Autonomous and non-autonomous activities differed from each other in notable ways, in terms of things like emotional and psychophysiological manifestations, volitional efforts, value of the situation, factor of time in the situation (including things like perception of time, speed of working, procrastination), and so on. Importantly, some of these dimensions are not typically captured by the standard definition of the construct of autonomy. Of course, whether the responses provided by our participants are unique to this culture, and reflect cultural differences in the experience of autonomy, is a different question, but it is an empirical question: to answer it, the same set of prompts could be given to doctoral students from universities in other countries that represent a range of cultures, and the results compared to what we found.
Conclusion
The two studies briefly described in the present paper provide support for the use of qualitative research methods as a way to deepen, expand, and potentially challenge how we understand key constructs of a theory, such as SelfDetermination Theory, whose empirical support to date has primarily drawn on quantitative approaches. We note that this may be especially helpful when considering the applicability of key constructs in other cultural settings.
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